As near as I can determine, the HTML spec allows for only one pair of
<HTML>...</HTML> tags to be present in a document. However, there are at
least a few browsers that happily nest these tags and seem to display the
information in the nested document as its author intended.
"Why would you want to do that?" you ask. Suppose I have a website built using
tables to define the various 'areas' of the page, and that one of the
website's pages displays the minutes from a meeting. I don't have the time to
take their Word docs containing the minutes, reformat them to fit the
website, create the HTML and install the document on the website. I would
like to allow authorized folks to prepare content for one of these page
'areas' and upload the complete HTML doc that they've prepared without having
to rewrite the document to fit the website.
I've found that at least several browsers are quite happy to correctly display
the contents of a nested HTML doc within a table cell. The people creating
the 'sub documents' are not computer/programming/HTML gurus - just operating
MS Word is a bit of a challenge for them - so I cannot hope to require they
produce nice clean HTML snippets. I intend to rely on this 'feature' so they
can prepare the web document using standard tool and put it up without
requiring excess work from me (or them).
Is this browser behavior 'proper'? If not, should it be? Yes, ideally the
whole document should be consistent, but realities often treat ideals
roughly. Should the spec allow nesting of <HTML>...</HTML> tag pairs so that
any reasonable containing object can format and display an HTML document
fairly independently of the rest of the page?
N